Candidate Optionality Will Drive Efficient and Better Hiring Outcomes

The recruiting landscape will continue to evolve through significant changes. Recruiting teams have been decimated in layoffs and efficiency is the thought on every business leader's mind. Recruiters are under pressure to deliver results, with their performance generally measured by the number of hires they make. To achieve this, recruiters aim to hire as efficiently as possible. This includes only spending time with candidates who have the clear skills and experience the hiring manager wants to see. This is where the concept of candidate optionality may change initial candidate assessment forever.

Current Hiring Challenges

The current hiring landscape is characterized by a low volume of available roles and a large pool of candidates. 

Recruiters are simultaneously managing more roles at a time and have more candidates applying to each role. Through limited bandwidth, recruiters are nearly forced to select the “best on paper” candidates to speak with. As seen below, based on Ashby’s customer base, the number of applications per hire have tripled in the last three years.

Managing Application Review

Until recently, there haven’t been great ways to increase the effectiveness of selection at the very top of the candidate funnel. Growth by Design Talent has a great read on How to Manage the Surge in Application Volume. 

We can also leverage technology for application review and decrease our Time to Calibration.

This is enabling recruiters to identify the best of the candidates in the applicant pool, or at least the best based on the resume and application questions. These solutions are still reliant on what the candidate submits to us in the form of a resume and application responses.

Somewhere between 90-99% of applications are being rejected without talking to anyone. They believe they are a fit or wish they were. We know that candidates have a less favorable opinion and candidateNPS when they apply for a role and are rejected. 📉

What if there was a way to expand our assessment of candidates without the limitations of a recruiter’s bandwidth constraints? 

Candidate Optionality

People like choices. Choices allow us to have input into the decision and outcome.

AI capabilities may change the employer-powered hiring dynamic and we can leverage a Layer 2 hiring solution to scale.

Think about a typical grocery store. There are traditional checkout lanes where humans scan your items and even help with loading your groceries. There are also self checkout lanes where we scan and bag the groceries ourselves. 

In general, my approach is if there is an open human run checkout lane, I take it. If there is any wait at all, I will use the self-checkout lane. I know other people will choose the self-checkout lane every time. Humans have preferences.

Candidate optionality will become very similar. 

Companies should begin providing knowledge-worker candidates with more options and control over their hiring process. A hiring self-service lane can be created. 

Current State

Once a candidate is selected to move forward at the application review stage, the next step is generally a conversation with a recruiter. The recruiter will send an email with a direct booking link or the worst, ‘let me know days and times that you are available.’ 😰

For now, the candidate compares their calendar with the recruiter’s availability. Recruiters are working on too many roles and the next available time slot might be a week out or worse. Candidates will choose a future time or will opt out of the process entirely if they have better immediate options.

Future State

Imagine a new scheduling system. If the recruiter has bandwidth and immediate availability, the candidate will likely choose to talk to the human. If the recruiter doesn’t have immediate availability to speak with the candidate, the candidate might opt into the self-service lane.

What will this self-service lane look like?

This might include a pre-screening call where they can find out more about the position, respond to automated questions or an AI interviewer, and enter a candidate portal where they have complete access to all of the FAQs they want to gain better insight into the company and the role. 

This introduces a way for companies to get more information on more candidates and have better candidate selection. It also allows candidates to opt-out if they find out the position is not ideal and they can do this in minutes, not weeks.

Think about a streamlined process that moves from application, pre-screening, ready for Hiring Manager review within one hour. 

This approach allows for candidates to drive their interview process and showcase their skills and experience.

The introduction of candidate optionality can have a win-win effect for both companies and candidates. Companies can benefit from a more efficient hiring process, while candidates gain more control over their application journey.

The Win-Win

This approach might be great for companies that have too much talent interest and where recruiters generally hire based on the candidate's past company. (more thoughts on this here.)

By opening optionality at the top of the funnel, you can nudge candidates who you would ordinarily not speak with to complete a recorded interview response to your main questions. You give them an opportunity to present their experience and knowledge and potentially find great additional candidates to consider who wouldn’t have been selected for a first conversation due to recruiter bandwidth.

AI interviewing solutions might better enable us to hire the right candidate by removing biases.

Maybe the candidate recognizes they are not great at live interviewing and haven’t had much luck getting past the recruiter. This gives them control over their outcome.

Candidates might need to control the speed of their interview process more. An AI-enhanced or led interview process allows them to complete many of the early steps in as little as one day.

This is a win-win. 🙌

Candidates win because they have choice and can move quickly on the first stages of the hiring process.

Companies win because they get to assess more candidates without increasing the time or people needed to assess.

AI screening might better force structured assessment. This might be the biggest win. You will be forced to drive alignment on exactly what you are looking for, otherwise, the AI interviewer will be asking the wrong questions, comparing the responses to the preferred rubric responses, and wasting everyone’s time.

How will we know if this optionality is enabling better outcomes?

The best part of this optionality is we can compare the impact and results. You will need to control for the variables of experience and level of the candidate. A VP candidate might have vastly different preferences than a junior candidate. Finance might be very different from Marketing candidates.

Within recruiting we can evaluate our current baseline metrics and understand how candidate optionality impacts them. Hypothetical below.

Summarizing my thoughts, candidate optionality and AI-enhanced interviewing can revolutionize the hiring process, providing a more efficient, transparent, and candidate-centric experience. By leveraging technology and introducing new hiring solutions, companies can improve their hiring outcomes and have meaningful impact on their key metrics.

I have only touched on one aspect of candidate optionality in this post, focusing on increasing top-of-funnel assessment. There are many additional ways to explore this. 🚀

What other metrics would you consider important in understanding the impact of experimenting with an AI interviewer in place of the recruiter at the first conversation point?